‘Artists' Journeys That Shaped Our World' Review: Going Places, Seeing Things
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) orbited Mount Fuji's sacred summit for years, painting the peak and the people living beneath it from dozens of locales. In works such as 'Ushibori in Hitachi Province' (ca. 1830-33, above), the mountain looms over its subjects like a watchful god. Hokusai was so moved by the sights he witnessed in his travels that he changed his name to Gakyō Rōjin Manji: 'The Old Man Crazy to Paint.' Equally mad about painting was Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), whose nocturnal wanderings around Austria's Lake Attersee led locals to dub him the Waldschrat ('forest demon'). The destination inspired his most innovative landscapes, in which nature devours a castle, the Schloss Kammer.
For the Flemish painter Alexander Keirincx (1600-52), British castles proved a muse after King Charles I commissioned him to paint the royal residences in Scotland and Yorkshire. Keirincx showed the countryside surrounding these stony manors bathed in a pastoral light—a vision that stoked the popular image of the British landscape as a mythic ideal and helped create the very British genre of house portraiture. This was the landscape, however, that David Hockney (1937-) sought to escape when he decamped for California in 1964, trading rainy Yorkshire for eternal summer in Los Angeles, where he would discover the motif of shimmering swimming pools that became his trademark.
Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) made a globe-trotting odyssey in pursuit of the lover who'd dumped him. Did he win her back? No. But he did see the ancient sculpture of four continents, whose influence greatly enlivened his work. Berthe Morisot's (1841-95) travels brought happier romantic tidings: In Normandy, she cultivated her plein-air technique as well as a relationship with Eugène Manet. The two were engaged while painting side by side. They honeymooned on Britain's Isle of Wight, which Morisot declared 'the prettiest place for painting.' Mr. Elborough's book makes a breezy companion to any summer wanderings.
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